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squidias 's review for:
Openly Straight
by Bill Konigsberg
I found Rafe immensely unrelatable. I feel like that's important to start with, that I sometimes couldn't relate to the protagonist to the point that reading his take on things and POV was frustrating, and I still gave this book five stars.
Openly Straight is a novel about labels, high school hierarchies, claiming identities for your own, and discovering youself. Seamus Rafael "Rafe" Goldberg is a perfectly, painfully high school narrator and, while I had to stop reading to put my face into my hands several times because he was extraordinarily dense or ridiculous (I have at least three notes in this book that say "I'm about to go feral"), that was the charm of it; having a narrator that didn't really know what he wanted and contradicted himself because he's just coming into himself was beautiful, and truly the only way for this story to be told. I think the best (and most exasperating) line was "... And I smiled, grateful I had a friend who didn’t need me to be someone I was not" because that's really what this whole thing is about for Rafe: becoming comfortable in his own skin and finding people who care truly about him, Rafe Goldberg, beyond the personas and the layers and the labels.
I devoured Openly Straight and it was thought-provoking, incensing, and an utter delight.
Openly Straight is a novel about labels, high school hierarchies, claiming identities for your own, and discovering youself. Seamus Rafael "Rafe" Goldberg is a perfectly, painfully high school narrator and, while I had to stop reading to put my face into my hands several times because he was extraordinarily dense or ridiculous (I have at least three notes in this book that say "I'm about to go feral"), that was the charm of it; having a narrator that didn't really know what he wanted and contradicted himself because he's just coming into himself was beautiful, and truly the only way for this story to be told. I think the best (and most exasperating) line was "... And I smiled, grateful I had a friend who didn’t need me to be someone I was not" because that's really what this whole thing is about for Rafe: becoming comfortable in his own skin and finding people who care truly about him, Rafe Goldberg, beyond the personas and the layers and the labels.
I devoured Openly Straight and it was thought-provoking, incensing, and an utter delight.